Original post:  http://bearlamp.com.au/no-negative-press-agreement/

What is a no negative press agreement?

A no negative press agreement binds a media outlet's consent to publish information provided by a person with the condition that they be not portrayed negatively by the press.

Why would a person want that?

In recognising that the press has powers above and beyond every-day people to publish information and spread knowledge and perspective about an issue that can be damaging to an individual.  An individual while motivated by the appeal of publicity, is also concerned about the potential damage caused by negative press.

Every person is the hero of their own story, from one's own perspective they performed actions that were justified and motivated by their own intention and worldview, no reasonable person would be able to tell their story (other than purposefully) in which they are spun as the negative conspirator of a plot, actively causing negative events on the world for no reason.

Historically, humans have been motivated to care more about bad news than good news, for reasons that expand on the idea that bad news might ring your death (and be a cause of natural selection) and good news would be irrelevant for survival purposes.  Today we are no longer in that historic period, yet we still pay strong attention to bad news.  It's clear that bad news can personally effect individuals - not only those in the stories, but others experiencing the bad news can be left with a negative worldview or motivated to be upset or distraught.  In light of the fact that bad news is known to spread more than good news, and also risks negatively affecting us mentally, we are motivated to choose to avoid bad news, both in not creating it, not endorsing it and not aiding in it's creation.

The binding agreement is designed to do several things:

• protect the individual from harm
• reduce the total volume of negative press in the world
• decrease the damage caused by negative press in the world
• bring about the future we would rather live in
• protect the media outlet from harming individuals

Does this limit news-maker's freedom to publish?

That is not the intent.  On the outset, it's easy to think that it could have that effect, and perhaps in a very shortsighted way it might have that effect.  Shortly after the very early effects, it will have a net positive effect of creating news of positive value, protecting the media from escalating negativity, and bringing about the future we want to see in the world.  If it limits media outlets in any way it should be to stop them from causing harm.  At which point any non-compliance by a media entity will signal the desire to act as agents of harm in the world.

Why would a media outlet be an agent of harm?  Doesn't that go against the principles of no negative press?

While media outlets (or humans), set out with the good intentions of not having a net negative effect on the world, they can be motivated by other concerns.  For example, the value of being more popular, or the direction from which they are paid for their efforts (for example advertising revenue).  The concept of competing commitment, and being motivated by conflicting goals is best covered by Scott under the name moloch.  

The no negative press agreement is an attempt to create a commons which binds all relevant parties to action better than the potential for a tragedy.  This commons has a desire to grow and maintain itself, and is motivated to maintain itself.  If any media outlets are motivated to defect, they are to be penalised by both the other press and the public.

How do I encourage a media outlet to comply with no negative press?

Ask them to publish a policy with regard to no negative press.  If you are an individual interested in interacting with the media, and are concerned with the risks associated with negative press, you can suggest an individual binding agreement in the interim of the media body designing and publishing a relevant policy.

I think someone violated the no negative press policy, what should I do?

At the time of writing, no one is bound by the concept of no negative press.  Should there be desire and pressure in the world to motivate entities to comply, they are more likely to comply.  To create the pressure a few actions can be taken:

• Write to media entities on public record and request they consider a no negative press policy, outline clearly and briefly your reasons why it matters to you.
• Name and shame media entities that fail to comply with no negative press, or fail to consider a policy.
• Vote with your feet - if you find a media entity that fails to comply, do not subscribe to their information and vocally encourage others to do the same.

Meta: this took 45mins to write.

Here's my op-ed that uses long-term orientation, probabilistic thinking, numeracy, consider the alternative, reaching our actual goals, avoiding intuitive emotional reactions and attention bias, and other rationality techniques to suggest more rational responses to the Paris attacks and the ISIS threat. It's published in the Sunday edition of The Plain Dealer​, a major newspaper (16th in the US). This is part of my broader project, Intentional Insights, of conveying rational thinking, including about politics, to a broad audience to raise the sanity waterline.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/30/saviours-universe-four-unlikely-men-save-world

The article is titled "The scientific A-Team saving the world from killer viruses, rogue AI and the paperclip apocalypse", and features interviews with Martin Rees, Huw Price, Jaan Tallinn and Partha Dasgupta. The author takes a rather positive tone about CSER and MIRI's endeavours, and mentions x-risks other than AI (bioengineered pandemic, global warming with human interference, distributed manufacturing).

I find it interesting that the inferential distance for the layman to the concept of paperclipping AI is much reduced by talking about paperclipping America, rather than the entire universe: though the author admits still struggling with the concept. Unusually for an journalist who starts off unfamiliar with these concepts, he writes in a tone that suggests that he takes the ideas seriously, without the sort of "this is very far-fetched and thus I will not lower myself to seriously considering it" countersignalling usually seen with x-risk coverage. There is currently the usual degree of incredulity in the comments section though.

For those unfamiliar with The Guardian, it is a British left-leaning newspaper with a heavy focus on social justice and left-wing political issues. 

The chatterbot "Eugene Goostman" has apparently passed the Turing test:

No computer had ever previously passed the Turing Test, which requires 30 per cent of human interrogators to be duped during a series of five-minute keyboard conversations, organisers from the University of Reading said.

But ''Eugene Goostman'', a computer programme developed to simulate a 13-year-old boy, managed to convince 33 per cent of the judges that it was human, the university said.

As I kind of predicted, the program passed the Turing test, but does not seem to have any trace of general intelligence. Is this a kind of weak p-zombie?

EDIT: The fact it was a publicity stunt, the fact that the judges were pretty terrible, does not change the fact that Turing's criteria were met. We now know that these criteria were insufficient, but that's because machines like this were able to meet them.

The paper is called DNA methylation age and human tissues and cell types and it's from Genome Biology. Here is a Nature article based on the paper.

I have submitted this to LW because of its relevance to the measurement of aging and, hence, to life extension. Here is a bit from the Nature piece:

"Ageing is a major health problem, and interestingly there are really no objective measures of aging, other than a verified birth date," says Darryl Shibata, a pathologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "Studies like this one provide important new efforts to increase the rigour of human aging studies."

Note: The discrepancy in spelling ("ageing" vs. "aging") is in the original.

When predicting future threats, we also need to predict future policy responses. If mass pandemics are inevitable, it matters whether governments and international organisations can rise to the challenge or not. But its very hard to get a valid intuitive picture of government competence. Consider the following two scenarios:

• Governments are morasses of incompetence, saturated by turf wars, perverse incentives, inefficiencies, regulatory capture, and excessive risk aversion. The media reports a lot of the bad stuff, but doesn't have nearly enough space for it all, as it has to find some room for sport and naked celebrities. The average person will hear 1 story of government incompetence a day, anyone following the news will hear 10, a dedicated obsessive will hear 100 - but this is just the tip of the iceberg. The media sometimes reports good news to counterbalance the bad, at about a rate of 1-to-10 of good news to bad. This rate is wildly over-optimistic.

• Governments are filled mainly by politicians desperate to make a positive mark on the world. Civil servants are professional and certainly not stupid, working to clear criteria with a good internal culture, in systems that have learnt the lessons of the past and have improved. There is a certain amount of error, inefficiency, and corruption, but these are more exceptions than rules. Highly politicised issues tend to be badly handled, but less contentious issues are dealt with well. The media, knowing that bad news sells, fills their pages mainly with bad stuff (though they often have to exaggerate issues). The average person will hear 1 story of government incompetence a day, anyone following the news will hear 10, a dedicated obsessive will hear 100 - but some of those are quite distorted. The media sometimes reports good news to counterbalance the bad, at about a rate of 1-to-10 of good news to bad. This rate is wildly over-pessimistic.

These two situations are, of course, completely indistinguishable for the public. The smartest and most dedicated of outside observers can't form an accurate picture of the situation. Which means that, unless you have spent your entire life inside various levels of government (which brings its own distortions!), you don't really have a clue at general government competence. There's some very faint clues that governments may be working better than we generally think: looking at the achievements of past governments certainly seems to hint at a higher rate of success than the reported numbers today. And simply thinking about the amount of things that don't go wrong in a city, every day, hints that someone is doing their job. But these clues are extremely weak.

At this point, one should look up political scientists and other researchers. I hope to be doing that at some point (or the FHI may hire someone to do that). In the meantime, I just wanted to collect a few stories of government success to counterbalance the general media atmosphere. The purpose is not just to train my intuition away from the "governments are intrinsically incompetent" that I currently have (and which is unjustified by objective evidence). It's also the start of a project to get a better picture of where governments fail and where they succeed - which would be much more accurate and much more useful than an abstract "government competence level" intuition. And would be needed if we try and predict policy responses to specific future threats.

So I'm asking if commentators want to share government success stories they may have come across. Especially unusual or unsuspected stories. Vaccinations, clean-air acts, and legally establishing limited liability companies are very well known success stories, for instance, but are there more obscure examples that hint an unexpected diligence in surprising areas?

Potentially of interest to my fellow antipodean LessWrongers. Stasis Systems Australia is a company seeking to start a cryonics facility in Australia. Their website is pretty sparse, but they just sent out a mailing list update on how they are going, and it doesn't appear that the information therein is located in any news section of the website, so I thought I'd post it here.

Hello,

We at  Stasis Systems Australia Ltd are happy to report our plans to build a cryonics facility in Australia are progressing well.

You may remember contacting us or attending our online meeting last year, but here's a quick reminder of what we're doing.

We are a group of Australasian cryonicists putting together a non-for-profit organisation to build and run the first cryonic storage facility in the southern hemisphere.

We're proud to have WA-based Marta Sandberg on the board of directors as an advisor, as she has a wealth of knowledge and experience from her ongoing role as a director of the  well-established Cryonics Institute.

We are now officially incorporated as a not-for-profit company, and one investor away from the magic number of ten that will trigger the next stage of the project - selecting a piece of land and starting construction!

We have had productive discussions with the NSW Department of Health, and are developing positive relationships with the Cryonics Institute, Alcor, and KrioRus.

We think what we’re doing is worthwhile and in the long term will be of great benefit to the Australasian community.  If you’d like to get involved either as an investor or a volunteer, that would be fantastic.  We’d love help with articles for the website, search engine optimisation, web graphics, or any other skill you have that we might need.

We would especially appreciate you passing this update on to anyone you know who might be interested.

 

Best regards,

The Stasis Systems Australia team

www.StasisSystemsAustralia.com

 

Follow @StaSysAus on Twitter

Like StaSysAus on Facebook

A short article, quoting me and Luke:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-05/17/the-dangers-of-an-ai-smarter-than-us

It makes the point that it's not the shambling robots that are the risks here, but the other powers of intelligence.

An independent report shows Japan was much closer to nuclear disaster than previously reported.

“Prime Minister Kan had his minuses and he had his lapses,” Mr. Funabashi said, “but his decision to storm into Tepco and demand that it not give up saved Japan.”

Paper here. Lay summary here. Some bits from the latter:

The problem is this. The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft were launched towards Jupiter and Saturn in the early 1970s. After their respective flybys, they continued on escape trajectories out of the Solar System, both decelerating under the force of the Sun's gravity. But careful measuremenrs show that the spacecraft are slowing faster than they ought to, as if being pulled by an extra unseen force towards the Sun.

Spacecraft engineers' first thought was that heat emitted by the spacecraft could cause exactly this kind of deceleration. But when they examined the way heat was produced on the craft, by on board plutonium, and how this must have been emitted, they were unable to make the numbers add up.

Now Frederico Francisco at the Instituto de Plasmas e Fusao Nuclear in Lisbon Portugal, and a few pals, say they've worked out where the thermal calculations went wrong.

I thought this may be of interest to the LW community. Jacob Barnett is a 12-year old male who taught himself all of high school math (algebra through calculus), has a currently scored math IQ of 170 (for what that's worth) and is currently on track to become a researcher of astrophysics. His current major news worthy claim-to-fame (aside from being really young): The Big Bang Theory is currently incorrect (I believe the article states he has something about a lack of carbon in the model), and he's planning to develop a new theory.

I haven't learned anything serious in physics, so I have nothing to note on his claim. I realize the news article cited puts him claim fairly generally, so I'll ask this: Can someone explain how elements are generally modeled to have formed from the big bang? And is there anything that it Jacob may be missing in the current literature?

A lot of links and media content has been posted lately. Would it make sense to create another area where people can submit relevant links, images or videos? If the discussion area was meant to keep the community blog clean and focused then one could devote the discussion area to questions, proofreading and mediocre posts while an additional media section could be destined for third party content:

Community Blog (main area)

• A set of agreed upon topics.
• Temporary announcements (meetups etc.)

Discussion Area

• Questions
• Proofreading
• Mediocre content (not yet ready or not suitable for the main area)
• Meta discussions about the community
• Miscellaneous topics (e.g. AI, recommendations and questions about nutrition etc.)

Rationality News (recommended third party content)

• News and media aggregation
• Ranking and discovery
• Relevant scientific research/studies
• Important technological progress

There is a lot of good and bad stuff out there to learn from. Yet this content is often discovered by people who don't want, or are not able to write a post about it or start a discussion but would be willing to submit a link to the content. This would allow LW to offer a selection of relevant high quality third party news and media content without having the discussion area (RSS feed) cluttered with it.

LW could also employ a few moderators that can move posts to the appropriate area. For example, if a post in the main area is being downvoted or near zero after a week it will be moved to the discussion area. Or if someone posts a link to third-party content to the discussion area it is moved to the news (media) area. Users, especially newbies and outsiders would also benefit from it by not being exposed to inappropriate content but rather to the highest quality of content to be expected when browsing a certain area.

So what do you think, would a rationality news area be a worthwhile feature?